Recycling Helps in the Fight Against Global Warming

"Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" has been the theme for encouraging citizens to produce less waste and recycle. Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) more commonly known as garbage consists of product packaging, grass clipping, furniture, clothing, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, and other disposables.

"The reuse and reduce approach saves natural resources, reduces energy use and emission of greenhouse gases, cuts down on transportation costs and pollution, and results in less materials dumped in landfills," said Deborah Mitchell of CharityGuide.com

In Palm Beach County the Solid Waste Authority was able to process 884,005 tons of MSW in 2004. They claim responsibility for preventing 524,626 tons of waste from reaching landfills.

The item most frequently encountered in MSW landfills is simply paper-on average, it accounts for more than 40 percent of a landfill's contents. Newspapers alone can take up as much as 13 percent of the space in United States landfills.

Organic materials (including paper) do not easily biodegrade once they are disposed of in a landfill. Paper is many times more resistant to deterioration when compacted in a landfill than when it is in open contact with the atmosphere, according the Environmental Protection Agency.

Evidence by researcher William Rathje, who runs 'the Garbage Project', has shown that, newspapers from the 1960's when excavated from a landfill, can be intact and readable.

With this statistic comes the impact of solid waste on the issue of Global Warming. Recycling prevents the emission of many greenhouse gases and water pollutants, saves energy, supplies valuable raw materials to industry, creates jobs, stimulates the development of greener technologies, conserves resources for our children's future, and reduces the need for new landfills and combustors according to the EPA.